Previously in the Darklyverse: Dorcas and the Gryffindors began recruiting others to join the Order of the Phoenix (CH33), while Marlene turned to Peter for help upon learning Mary's plans to gather information from within underground pureblood society (CH33). Em made efforts to rejoin the group but never fully repaired her friendship with Sirius (CH29) after explosively revealing the reason that it ended in the first place: the murder of her parents as Bellatrix Lestrange's Death Eater initiation rite (CH26). Andromeda accepted a job as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor (CH8), but Sirius refused to open up to her in spite of her presence throughout the year. Marlene and Sirius discovered that Dumbledore knew the group had mobilized for the war (CH33).

xx

April 25th, 1977: Sirius Black

They've barely walked ten paces away from the gargoyle guarding the stairs to Dumbledore's office when Sirius flings open the door to the nearest boys' restroom and beckons Marlene to follow him inside. "Honestly, Sirius, McGonagall just—"

"Not to shag," he says. There's no one at the urinals, but ducking his head to check for feet, he spots a pair in one of the far stalls and barks, "You in the corner! Hurry it up!"

"Sirius, really," sighs Marlene.

He slouches against the stone wall, feeling the coldness of it grind into his back, and when Marlene lays her head on top of his, he doesn't adjust around her. "I don't have all day to wait around for you, mate," Sirius calls out.

"For god's sake," responds a familiar voice from the stall, and moments later, there's a flushing sound and Benjy Fenwick emerges. "You couldn't just take her to your dormitory, Sirius?"

"Screw off, Fenwick."

"Sirius," Marlene chides.

Benjy rolls his eyes, smiling, and kicks a few squares of toilet paper off his heel as he turns on the faucet. "Bloke can't even go to the loo around here without getting—"

"Fine. You want in? Fine," says Sirius. Marlene starts telling him to not, but he cuts across her to add, "It's us, Ben. It's us who's been doing the pranks—"

"—Good on you!—"

"—Only it's more than pranks, and apparently Dumbledore knows it, and I dunno how I'm supposed to get anything done around here if Minnie's going to be breathing down our necks every time we try to…"

Benjy fumbles around in the sink for the bar of soap he's just dropped, then shuts off the water without bothering to rinse his hands clean of it. "What's more than pranks supposed to mean?"

Sirius and Marlene exchange a look, and Marlene begins, "Well, it started as just an education thing, you know—"

"Yeah, I got that part—"

"But things were getting… worse out there, and we needed to do more. We're still trying to figure out what more, but at least we're trying."

Benjy's eyes dart from Marlene to Sirius back to Marlene again, and he wipes soap scum all over the sides of his robes. Sirius doesn't like the way their voices are echoing against the walls. "Who's 'we?'"

"The nine of us—the nine Gryffindor sixth years—and Dorcas Meadowes," Marlene says tiredly. "There are a few others in on it, too, but no one else knows much yet. It's hard—you think you know people, and then…"

"Right, yeah," says Benjy with a slight tremor in his voice. "I'll—well, I'll help, of course I'll help. Liz would, too, I bet, and maybe Eddie."

"You work on that, then," grunts Sirius, and Benjy gives them a sharp nod on his way out.

He finally looks at Marlene properly as the door swings shut behind Benjy, and her eyes are narrow and wrinkled around the edges. "That was risky."

"He was on our list!"

"That was reckless; you know it was reckless. It's like you just said; Dumbledore's onto us now…"

"All the more reason to push harder and prove we're not just school kids," Sirius insists. "But that's not what I wanted to get you alone for."

"No?"

"No. I wanted," he says, lightly skimming her cheekbone with the back of his hand, "to check in with you about—whatever that was back there with Dumbledore. You seem pretty affected."

"I am pretty affected by it," replies Marlene, turning her head down, her shoulders hunched. "You don't… it's complicated."

When Sirius puts his thumb under her chin to tilt it up, she nudges out of his reach. He studies her—broad forehead, thin lashes, brown complexion—and he tells her, "You affect me," and the momentary upturn of the corners of her lips looks real to him.

These days, they never talk about how things stand between them. He can still see it that same taut smile of hers sometimes: the self-righteous condescension and the he always left her buried deep someplace where he's got no idea how to broach it—to dredge up hardness where there's no space for it anymore, you know, with the war. Marlene is a thicket of accusations, and she's never taken accountability for her own autonomy, not with him or with Mary or with getting tossed out of her Auror internship. And yet she's got soft pockets that peek out sometimes, mostly when she's made to feel shame, and with the possible exception of Em, Sirius has never known how to step back and let anybody so haughty run round with bruises so blotchy.

They don't talk about themselves anymore, and Marlene's smiles are getting kinder, and Sirius reckons he can live like that at least a while longer.

They part ways when they reach the common room, Marlene pressing her lips to his cheek uncharacteristically chastely when she says goodbye, and when Sirius clambers up the stairs and into the dormitory, he's surprised to find all the beds empty, with Remus gone and James and Peter facing each other, cross-legged, on the floor. "Where's—?"

"Prefect patrols," Peter explains.

"Yeah, well, he's not doing a great job of them tonight. By comparison, it would've been excellent for Moony to walk in on me and Marlene instead of goddamn McGonagall."

James winces. "Tough break, mate. Sit down, have some candy, it'll help."

Sirius flops down next to Peter and catches the pack of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans that James tosses to him, but he gets pepper and bogey and gasoline on the first three tries, so he gives it up and nurses a Sugar Quill instead. "She sent us to Dumbledore, but he didn't even care, just gave Marlene this veiled bull about suspecting we're mobilizing and how disappointed he is in her, and then we recruited Benjy Fenwick in the bathroom on the walk back—"

"Kinky," says James, and Sirius pelts him with the remaining Every Flavor Beans.

"Well, we knew Dumbledore would probably deduce what we've been doing sooner or later after we stopped the pranks to focus on actually making plans," says Peter with a sigh, "and we all agreed that if anything we ought to try and speed things up if we're caught—"

"Which clearly you're still on board with doing if you've already grabbed Benjy," James adds. "You didn't waste any time there, did you?"

"He swallowed it easily enough," says Sirius. "Offered to talk to Ed and Elisabeth, too."

"Also not surprising," James says, flicking a bean into the air and catching it in his mouth. "That's got to be—have we already talked by now to everybody we'd had in mind?"

Nodding, Peter says, "I think that should be everyone. Meadowes already talked to Fabian, who's working on Gid; Alice got Longbottom last week…"

"Marlene's planning on talking to Millie LeProut this week," Sirius adds.

"Who?"

"Quidditch," Peter supplies.

"Oh, right."

Squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, Sirius interjects, "Do we have any alcohol? I could do to forget about the fact that I've got McGonagall in the morning."

"Not anymore," says Peter apologetically. "Remus flushed the last of it with James over the weekend. He's cutting back because of Lily."

"Shut it," James says lazily.

"I'm glad to hear you're taking better care of yourself, but do it for you, not for her, mate. Reforming for other people never turns out to be enough." Fleetingly, Sirius thinks of Mum chucking him out, of the Howlers that only ever made him feel even more determined to consort with impurities up at school.

"Okay, okay. God."

Mum, Marlene, Emmeline—considering the kind of women lurking under the trapdoors in Sirius's head, at least the one in James's life appears to be a good influence on him. He's not saying he doesn't love Marlene, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through when Marlene is your girlfriend, and she's not exactly the unconditional type, is she?

He'll always have James, though, and Remus and Peter. A surge of affection for the three of them bubbles up now, and Sirius slides down to rest with his back on the floor, crossing his arms behind his head. "You both know I would do anything to save you, right? Even if the mess was my fault."

"Us too," says James, his voice strained.

"The mess is all of our faults already," Peter mumbles. "Let's… let's never blame each other for what we do to protect each other, all right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, of course," James answers. "Is everything—is there something going on, Wormy?"

Peter doesn't answer at first but finally says, "Mary's got some things going on, but I'm handling it."

Tilting his head to look at Peter, Sirius considers asking what's the matter but decides against it. Peter's never been one to betray anybody else's privacy even under pressure, and if anyone knows how to decipher Mary to help her with—herself, it certainly isn't Sirius. "Right," he says, "well, you can always let either of us know if you need backup with it. Remus too."

"Thanks, Padfoot," Peter says quietly, and the matter drops.

xx

The thing about Emmeline is she's not nice and neither is he, and unlike Marlene, Em's got no interest in pretending otherwise. He avoids catching her alone when he can nowadays, but unfortunately for Sirius, he isn't the only Gryffindor who skips Transfiguration the next morning.

The soft pressure at the foot of his bed when Em takes a seat there is what wakes him, and at first he expects to see Marlene when he opens his eyes—it's not like he's used to finding anybody else in bed with him in the mornings, except occasionally one of the boys, and he already knows from the racket they made before breakfast that none of them skived off class. It's a weird, shameful thing, the girl you think is in your bed turning out to be somebody else entirely. It used to happen to Sirius in fourth year sometimes, when he'd skipped straight from Em's friendship to Marlene's favors (for lack of any good words), and both then and now, it's always given him a quicksand sort of feeling, dry and tight and chafing beneath his ribcage.

"You're missing Transfiguration," Sirius says blearily.

"So are you."

"Did you want to get under?" he offers, not because he wants her to but because he's not sure what else she's waiting for.

"Oh, Sirius," she answers, and her voice breaks like violin strings in the winter, and it's the frigidity that makes him push himself up against the headboard. Em's twiddling her thumbs like engines, and Sirius wonders what she'd do if her reverie broke—cry, probably. "You think I want things when I don't. I don't enjoy seeing you. This isn't good for me."

Well, she got that last part right, if nothing else. "You think I spend all my time making assumptions about you."

"Don't be that way. I already know I never occur to you," she fires, but she's wrong there, too. Just because he doesn't hide out in the past like Em does doesn't mean she never crosses Sirius's mind—hell, he has to look at her just about every day across their politics, remembering her hands and averting her eyes.

"What do you need?"

She rolls her eyes and answers, "I just thought you'd want to know we're meeting with Dorcas again before lunch to check in about recruitment and follow up on names."

"Mary could have told me."

"Mary doesn't know. I'm telling her after she wakes up."

"Oh, so she gets to sleep in?"

"You're so crotchety in the mornings," says Em.

He's not sure why he's feeling belligerent today—because he's fresh out of patience for any more of her mixed signals, maybe, what with the way nobody is screaming loudly enough about the damn war going on. He wonders how much his detachment affects her, then stuffs the thought away with black envelopes in a corner somewhere.

It might've been the dream he'd been having: the details are already fading, but there's an agitation in the pit of his stomach that hadn't been there when he was swapping candy and misery with Peter and James the night before. His father had been in the dream, he's pretty sure, and Bellatrix and some kind of inferno.

"Fine, don't appreciate the favor," Em says, but he's pretty sure she didn't do it for him.

He knows the feeling. He's been there—in fourth year, when in a blink she was gone and Sirius was left revved up and skulking in the cobwebs, gunning for a blowout to match the ones circling in his mind. These days, Sirius channels his eruptions into pranks and Defense class and hideaway plots, and he doesn't take pause, and he doesn't care when the stitches are splitting.

Speaking of Defense, that's not going great, either. Take this week, for example, when he just about blinds Alice with a well-aimed Conjunctivitis Curse in dueling practice.

"God, Sirius, how many times do I have to tell you lot: jinxes and hexes only during class duels!" cries Andromeda, blocking Peter's incoming Stunner and striding toward Alice with a scathing glare at Sirius. "Do you want me to send you to Professor Dumbledore?"

"Just had a chat with him on Monday, actually. He brought sweets," says Sirius in a deadpan.

"Oh, shut it, Black," Alice says miserably, but it's hard to take her seriously when her voice is cracking and she's flung her arms up in front of her face, whimpering as Andromeda tries to coax them down and examine her eyes.

The rest of the group's put their wands away by now; Lily and Marlene swap looks, James shakes his head at Sirius with his lips pressed together, and Peter makes a few paces toward Alice and then falls back on his heels as if unsure whether Andromeda will bark at him, too, if he crowds her. Crouching down behind Alice, Remus covers one of her hands with his.

A faint orange glow emerges from the tip of Andromeda's wand and diffuses out around Alice's eyes and cheekbones. "All right, Alice, I'm going to need you to open up those eyes for a few seconds. I know, I know it hurts, come on now…"

Andromeda's obscuring his view of Alice, but she must have complied for at least a moment because Andromeda sighs and gets up, extending Alice a hand. "Alice, I want you to go with Remus to see Madam Pomfrey in the hospital wing. Can you do that for me?" Satisfied with Alice's nod, Andromeda waits until Remus has helped her out the door, then says to Sirius, "You stay here. The rest of you can go."

They filter out with eyebrows raised, and when Sirius looks sullenly up at Andromeda, there are wrinkles in her forehead that he'd never noticed before. "Sit down, Sirius."

He sidles atop the nearest desktop and, realizing he's still clenching his wand with a sweaty hand, jams it in his robe pocket.

"I'm resigning at the end of this term," Andromeda says now, and she too perches on top of the desk across from Sirius. "I gave my notice to Dumbledore this week."

"You and every other wizard who's taught this class."

Stiffening, Andromeda says, "I'm not meant to be a teacher, Sirius; I took this job to watch out for you, not because it comes naturally to me, and there's no point staying on for your seventh year when I can't get through to you. Hell, maybe I set us up for this by accepting the job. Evidently, you're not looking for guidance from an authority."

"I did look up to you," mutters Sirius. "Always, as kids."

"Well, that was then. Don't think Professor Dumbledore hasn't spoken to me about that chat you had with him and Marlene, or that I haven't noticed those pranks your lot have been pulling. At least when you still lived with Orion and Walburga I knew you were safe—"

"Safe? You left," says Sirius, and he feels his temper starting to rise. "You ditched your fiancé and ran off with Ted."

"I decided not to allow the people who treated me the cruelest to continue dictating whether I was permitted to be happy. You of all people ought to understand how they work. They burn us off. I waited until you were at Hogwarts; I—"

"You left me to rot with Mum and Dad!" Sirius erupts, and it feels so good to ratchet his voice so high above the dam he's spent so long underneath. "You were the only one who—and then you weren't around anymore at reunions, and Bellatrix…"

"Oh, Sirius," she murmurs. It's the second time this week someone's said that to him, but Andromeda is so very unlike Em, more solemn and protective than dramatic or rash—except, of course, for this one crucial thing, the leaving, that Andromeda did to him, whatever she may claim. "You know I would have saved you if I knew how," she says now, crossing her ankles.

Noticing that he's started gripping his wand again, he lets it go. "I thought Alice could deflect the spell. I didn't want her to get injured."

"Why cast the curse, then?"

Because his tolerance is damn shot with all of it, but he's not about to tell Andromeda that. The room feels chilly, and Sirius answers, "We… there was a fight. She doesn't see the problem with—she thinks the laws aren't corrupt, but they are."

With a half-smile, Andromeda tells him, "People are products of the environments where they're raised, and the Abbotts go back a long way in society. So do the Blacks. You forget that neither of us saw Muggles as our equals until coming to Hogwarts."

"Yeah, and it took me all of a year, maybe, to work that one out for myself. She's of age."

"I know, but you can't just run around cursing anyone and everyone who doesn't understand what—what privilege is, or a microaggression is," Andromeda says, and she's right: he'd be better off saving his energy to aim straight for the source, not punching out in the symptoms.

He shouldn't have missed that meeting with Dorcas on Tuesday.

"You're good at your job, Andy; don't underestimate yourself," Sirius tells her, and then he sprints out the door.